Free Stalking Death by Kate Flora

her. Then she pushed away again. "You tell them to relax, okay. They can go ahead and do whatever they want. Send their lying letter. Pretend nothin's going on with Alasdair and them... all the things they done. No skin offa my ass. They had their chance. Best they could do was call me a crazy liar. So you tell them I'm handlin' it. Tell them, just wait and see what this crazy nigger bitch does next."
    She snatched up the pack and slung it over her shoulder. "I be goin'."
    "Shondra." I made my voice deliberately loud and commanding. She was tired of people who either patronized her or treated her with suspicion. "Sure you don't want to tell your side to someone who doesn't give a damn about the MacGregor money?"
    MacGregor money might be paying my salary, but I had to come into these things with an open mind. If EDGE started walking in and approving whatever schools wanted to do, our reputation would suffer. They didn't come to us because they wanted "yes" women. They came because we brought an experienced and unbiased outside opinion and were willing to call it the way we saw it. When the chips were down, we could be tough for them and tough to them.
    She half-turned toward me, giving me the benefit of her elegant profile. "I guess that would be you?"
    "That's right."
    "I'm supposta believe you might be on my side even though theys paying you?"
    "They're paying you, too," I pointed out, "and you're not on their side."
    She folded her arms and leaned back against the door frame. "You got a point there," she said. That was all she said, but she didn't leave.
    I walked down the room and leaned against the wall, facing her, imitating her posture. "When did the stalker first start bothering you?"
    "Didn't you hear?" she said. "They is no stalker."
    I repeated the question. She was silent so long I thought she wasn't going to answer. "Last spring."
    "April? May?"
    "April, I think."
    "What did he do?"
    "Phone calls."
    "Obscene phone calls?"
    "I guess."
    "You guess?"
    "They weren't obscene at first, just anonymous, like he'd go, 'do you know who this is?' and stuff like that. I didn't know who he was. He called a lot. I was trying to work and the work's hard for me, so I asked him to stop botherin' me. He kept it up, so I got nasty. That's when it got ugly."
    "Ugly how?"
    "Ugly sex talk. Sayin' disgusting things he'd like to do to me." She looked down at her shoes. "Now mostly he doesn't say anything. He just calls, knowing that's enough. Knowing I'll worry and won't sleep."
    "You had a roommate last year, right?"
    "Yeah."
    "She know about these calls?"
    "Sure. She was the one insisted I report them. I wasn't gonna. I wanted to tough it out." She clasped her arms more tightly against herself. Muscle definition I would have killed for, that I couldn't have if I spent my life in the gym. "I thought they'd stop."
    "She got some of these phone calls, too?"
    Shondra shook her head. "He'd always hang up if she answered. He was smart. Creepy smart. After a while, it got so he only called when I was alone in the room."
    "So your roommate never heard his voice?"
    "No. But she saw me getting enough so she could see how they bothered me."
    "Any idea how he knew you were alone?"
    "No. That's why it was so creepy. It was like he was watching. She'd leave the room and bingo, the phone would ring."
    "What was your roommate's name?"
    "Allie. Allison Schwartz. Why?"
    "I thought I might talk to her."
    "Check up on me?"
    "More like confirm."
    She gave me a 'yeah, right' look. "Tough luck. Allie's gone. Dropped out. They told her she was a loser so many times she started believin' it."
    "You stay in touch?"
    "No way. Allie's trying to forget this place, what it done... did... to her head. She don't want to hear from me. Not from you, either."
    Reading between the lines, she missed Allie. I wondered if the girl had been a friend. The picture they'd given me, and the way she presented herself, suggested loner. Social isolation was a common problem among